TELEVISION VIEW

TELEVISION VIEW; In Celebration of the Bad Girl

By Gina Barreca;

Published: September 1, 1991

Television, these days, is full of them. Where did they come from, these fast-talking, wisecracking, brilliantly satiric, funny women? They all seem to be a generic mid-30's to mid-40's and have repealed the restrictions that proclaim Good Girls cannot be funny, a rule as tight and unnatural as a girdle, and far more difficult to shed.

At what point was Good Girl Annette Funicello replaced by Madonna? (I keep a close eye on both, these two being the only Italian-American women I remember seeing on the small screen.) Both Annette Funicello and Madonna have the same general shape, but Madonna encases her breasts in steel.

How did our culture come to accept a woman who could snap back an answer as well as snap her gum? Good Girl Donna Reed has been replaced by Roseanne Barr-Arnold, Mrs. Brady has been eclipsed by Mrs. Bundy. Like the new breed of female comics, this new flock of wayward-women characters refuses to hand over the mike without securing the last laugh. What has allowed us to forsake the Good Girl and celebrate the Bad?

While growing up, I noticed that only certain kinds of people were allowed to be funny on "The Dating Game" and "The Newlywed Game." On "The Dating Game" answers could be sort of dirty, and on "The Newlywed Game" answers could be really dirty, because the couples were married. The idea was to make people in the audience shriek with laughter when the contestants got something wrong: "What does your spouse miss most about his bachelor days?" Her answer: "Playing baseball." His answer: "Playing the field." If he also said baseball, nobody laughed.

"The Dating Game" was slightly different. The job of the show's bachelorette was to ask questions that sounded innocent enough but could be answered by lines heavy with innuendo. The audience was given permission to understand the double meaning and laugh in appreciation of the guy's worldliness and wit, but the female contestant could not, under any circumstances, show that she understood. If she laughed, it gave away a terrible secret about her: she was not a Good Girl.

Who and what are Good Girls? Melanie from "Gone With the Wind" was the paradigmatic Good Girl. Mary Tyler Moore's character Mary Richards was Good, at least in public and often despite herself. "That Girl" (Marlo Thomas) was a Good Girl. The "good cousin," Cathy, on "The Patty Duke Show" was a Good Girl with an affected English accent. Good Girls did not brazenly draw attention to themselves or their ideas. They looked around to see what the other people in the audience were doing before they let themselves smile or cry because they had learned not to trust their instincts. Good Girls laughed with their mouths shut, if they laughed at all.

One observant viewer of early 60's movies, the comedy writer Anne Beatts, notes that Annette Funicello, the original Good Girl, never laughed. Instead, Annette "just put her hands on her hips and got mad at Ricky or Tommy or Eddie or whoever was carrying her surfboard, so that they could tell her how cute she was when she was mad."

The "vocational school" girls on the other hand -- with their scary hairdos, heavy eye makeup and spiked heels -- joked with the boys, chewed gum, laughed with their heads thrown back, had the last word and came to a Bad End. But even a Bad Girl's last word rarely crippled her opponent. In part, this is due to what the feminist scholar Emily Toth has called "the humane humor rule." Ms. Toth argues that women tend not to make fun of handicaps or physical appearance, things people cannot change.

Women, therefore, are more likely to make fun of those in high or invulnerable positions than their male counterparts. The bosses on "Roseanne" and "Murphy Brown" are treated as inferior human beings. Rather than laugh at the insecure mail clerk who always drops his papers, a "woman's show" will turn its humorous lens on the Brahmins.

In "Designing Women" the heroines challenge repressive institutions, such as nonunionized workplaces and the National Rifle Association by making fun of rules that keep such institutions strong. When Suzanne Sugarbaker wanted to protect her prize pig from pignappers, the show turned its humor on the fact that she was permitted to have a gun in her house. If Suzanne, hysterically selfish and unreasonable as she was, could own and misuse firearms, the argument ran, gun laws needed work.

When we watch a woman initiating humor, we are watching a woman who breaks the rules; it is invigorating and inspiring. Here is a woman who speaks her mind and says aloud what we might think but dare not utter for fear of being considered disgraceful.

Although the splitting of a woman into an angel or a whore is not particular to contemporary culture (every book from the Bible to "Jane Eyre" seems to hold the patent to this formula), it has saturated 20 years of television, manifesting itself in bizarre ways.

Remember the immortal words from "The Patty Duke Show": "You can lose your mind/ When cousins are two of a kind"? It's a wonder we didn't lose our minds, given the outrageous premise of a program that promised Identical Cousins. In this program, Patty was the Bad Girl, and her twin cousin was the Good Girl. Cathy adored a minuet and crepes suzette while Patty liked to "rock-and-roll, and a hot dog made her lose control." Cathy smiled. Patty laughed.

Gina Barreca is an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut. This article is adapted from her book "They Used to Call Me Snow White, but I Drifted: Women's Strategic Use of Humor" (Viking, 1991).